Closing in on a budget deal

With the last major issues resolved, House-Senate negotiators worked toward filing a $1.1 trillion government-wide spending bill by Monday night in hopes of quick action by Congress this week.

In the final bargaining, Treasury failed to get the money it sought to meet U.S. pledges to the International Monetary Fund. But compromises on President Barack Obama’s healthcare program were holding up together with financing for Wall Street regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Having been burned so often in the past, the Appropriations Committees were reluctant to comment publicly. But leadership aides said the bill’s framework was in place after a long weekend of talks, including face-to-face meetings between House Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) and his Senate counterpart, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.).

The timetable remains tight. The current stopgap continuing resolution, which has kept agencies operating thus far, is due to expire Wednesday. To avert any threat of a shutdown, a three-day extension through Saturday will be taken up by the House on Tuesday. And once the omnibus is filed Monday, Rogers and Mikulski believe that leaves sufficient time to complete floor debate on the giant package.

Hundreds of pages long, the bill literally touches every corner of the government as it fills in the blanks left by the budget agreement reached in December. That pact set the limits on spending; the omnibus now spells out where the dollars go.

After years of turmoil, it represents a massive, technical reset of appropriations from $600 million for TIGER grants in the Transportation Department to billions within weapons programs at Defense.

More broadly, the bill defines a new budget plateau — some say realism — for the remainder of Obama’s presidency.

Non-emergency appropriations are capped at $1.012 trillion as prescribed in December. These dollars are paired with about $91.7 billion in overseas contingency funds — chiefly for military operations in Afghanistan but also to help address the soaring number of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war.

Crises in central Africa will have a claim as well. But the Syria situation is the prime driver and within the State Department’s budget, the migration and refugee assistance account will grow to just over $3 billion, about 40 percent of which is financed through these contingency funds.

The so-called OCO funding meets the target set in the House Republican budget resolution last spring. But the total is about $7.2 billion higher than Obama’s 2014 request, and it shows the extra latitude House Republicans will allow to help the Pentagon adjust to the downward spiral now in its base funding.

No final numbers have been released but the Pentagon’s base budget is expected to drop to about $488 billion — $24 billion below what the House approved last July and about $20 billion above what was threatened by another round of sequestration this month.

When the OCO funding is counted, the total comes to about $570.5 billion. But that is still about $35 billion below the Pentagon funding level approved for 2013, before the first round of automatic cuts last March.

In line with December’s agreement, nondefense spending would be restored to $491.8 billion or roughly what it was last spring, prior to sequestration. But there is nothing akin to the military’s OCO reserve to deal with new domestic costs like Western wildfires or the flood of unaccompanied children who are crossing the U.S. border to escape turmoil in Latin America.

Indeed, December’s pact carried with it several codicils which effectively take away some of the flexibility the Appropriations leadership has had in the past. These are worth close to $2 billion altogether and complicate what are already tough choices.

To make room for firefighting funds in the Interior Department and Forest Service means no money is left to absorb the costs of the PILT program [payments in lieu of taxes], which helps small Western towns meet their local budgets when surrounded by federal lands. Spending to help house the children coming over the border competes with even bipartisan favorites like the National Institutes of Health — which is expected to end up still shy of what Congress had appropriated last spring before sequestration.